Intel Core i7-7700K overclocked past 7GHz barrier

Intel has been seeding samples of its upcoming Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake desktop CPU to reviewers and professional hardware enthusiasts ahead of what’ll likely be an official unveiling at CES 2017. One such recipient, Allen “Splave” Golibersuch, recently shared good news on the overclocking front.

TechPowerUp reports that Splave managed to cross the 7GHz barrier using the aforementioned i7-7700K. Specifically, he was able to hit a benchmark-stable 7,022.96MHz (multiplier of 69x and a bus speed of 101.78MHz) using an ASRock Z170 OC Formula motherboard.

That said, some concessions were made in order to achieve the milestone.

Splave had to disable HyperThreading as well as two of the processor’s four physical cores. The Vcore voltage, meanwhile, was pushed all the way up to 2.00V which meant liquid nitrogen had to be used for cooling.

That said, the chip reportedly completed PiFast in 9.02 seconds and zipped through SuperPi 32M in roughly four minutes and 20 seconds. When paired with an Asus GTX 1080 STRIX OC video card, the combo turned in a score of 643,316 in Aquamark and 86,798 in 3DMark 05.

Some will no doubt discredit the feat due to the fact that two cores were disabled and / or liquid nitrogen had to be used and that’s a fair argument. With NDAs set to lift any day now, most will be more interested in how the chip performs in an everyday setup with either air or basic liquid cooling.